Hi NoelsArk, and welcome!
I'll try to help you out, and hopefully others will join in, too.
NoelsArk said:
I made a batch of castile soap... 100% Olive Oil (Pomace) 16oz with the recommended amount of lye 2.06oz and 4.2oz water.
I just plugged your numbers into SoapCalc, and if I calculated right it looks like you made a 100% Castile soap with a 4% superfat, and a 32.5% lye concentration. I see nothing wrong with your superfat level, but when making HP I actually like to use more water than you did. CP is a different story for me- I can use a lesser amount of water in CP to great advantage, but not so with with HP. The heat causes a lot of the water to evaporate out during the cook in HP, so it's better to add more water up front to compensate. If I had made your recipe, I would have used 5.7 oz total water up front instead of 4.2 oz. Also- I normally add 2 tbsp of sodium lactate ppo on top of that.
NoelsArk said:
I made it in the slow cooker on low, all went well, it took a bit to trace but after 3 hours was ready to mold
How did you go about doing it? What I mean is, did you bring your soap to trace first before cooking it, or did you put everything in your crockpot, give it a stir, and just start cooking?
I ask because I find things go much more quickly with my HP if I mix the lye and oils together and bring them to trace with a stickblender first
before cooking it. My HP is usually ready to pour in about 90 minutes, sometimes slightly more and sometimes slightly less.
NoelsArk said:
so I did that and 48 hours later sliced it and set in to cure...it stayed a pliable.
"Pliable' is the nature of the HP beast and completely normal when you first cut and unmold an HP soap.
It'll take a few weeks or more for it to really harden up, especially so since you did a Castile. Those take much longer to harden than soaps made with other oils.
NoelsArk said:
I wasn't hapy with that so I melted it down in the cooker again and added 2% wt Sodium Lactate to harden it as well as 1/3 cup of water as it was not melting well.
Sodium lactacte is one of those things that works much better when it is added up front with the lye. I've found that if you add it to your soap after the fact, it won't do the job anywhere near as well as it would have if you had mixed it in with your lye water first. The way I do it is I mix my lye and water together, making sure the lye good and dissolved, then I mix in the SL before combining with my oils.
NoelsArk said:
Now, 3 days later I have an even musher unuseable blob that won't harden up at all!
Don't throw the towel in yet!
Three days is actually
not a good indicator in terms of how your soap will be in the end. It's much too soon yet to make that determination. Soap needs to cure out a little bit, even HP soap. With HP, the cure time is usually 2 weeks, although I still cure my HP soaps for 4 weeks, like my CP. Usually by 4 weeks, my HP has lost its sponginess.
NoelsArk said:
Any ideas/hope for this batch? Ps. This is the first time I have used sodium lactate and am not sure if I can use it as a hardener after the saponification process is complete!
Thanks!
Your soap is even mushier than it was at the beginning because that 1/3 cup extra water was actually a lot to more add. The good news, though, is that the water
will evaporate out over time.
If it were me, I'd leave it alone until it got firm enough to cut, then I'd cut it and just leave it alone for
at least 2 weeks (or 4 weeks, ideally) before making any determinations.
HTH!
IrishLass
